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Looking to Catalyst Projects to Revitalize Cities

October 6, 2011, 5am PDT

Atlanta's BeltLine is a great example of a big "catalyst project," writes Ryan Gravel, which repurposes a 22-mile railroad into a linear park. Other cities can follow suit.

"The highways that were designed to empty central Detroit at the end of each business day should be largely abandoned. They did their job and are no longer needed. Greenways could be built in their place, along with repaired connections to the urban grid (imagine something like Boston's Emerald Necklace linking the Detroit River directly to Wayne State University)."

"By implementing transit service and bikeways along these routes, supported by zoning, business incentives, and an appropriately open-minded political atmosphere, these revived avenues, just like the Atlanta BeltLine or the Los Angeles River, could become an infrastructure framework on which multiple futures for the city are built, none of which we can possibly right now imagine."